Prior to the present invention there was no single machine that provided a coordinated, systematic approach for burnishing floppy disks simultaneously on each side and therafter stuffing the burnished disk. directly into a protective jacket. Rather, individual disks were hand-fed into burnishing equipment, where one side and then the other was burnished, a slow time-consuming operation. Thereafter, individual disks were placed into protective jackets.
Floppy disks can be conveniently provided in a stacked form of a plurality of individual disks. Disks are conventionally formed from mylar sheeting coated with a very thin, magnetic oxide layer. However, the smoothness required for final operability of that oxide coating does not exist at the time the coating is applied, and various surface irregularities must be smoothed or removed by buffing. Such smoothing and polishing is required so that subsequently applied recording heads will not bounce along the surface or otherwise track improperly all of which would diminish an acceptable recording or playback result. In other words, the sensitivity of the recording surface must be polished to a very smooth condition and this is what the burnishing process will accomplish.
One of the problems of providing appropriate burnishing is to accurately and consistently remove only single disks from such a stack, that is, one disk at a time. Because disk surfaces prior to the final polishing are relatively smooth and because of static electricity that can build up between disks, relatively great attractive forces can be created between individual disks that tend to hold several disks together as a group or unit. Thus, when trying to pick one from the top of any stack, two or more might easily be removed. In a burnishing operation where both sides are being simultaneously burnished, especially an automatic one, that is not desirable.
Perforated rolls to which a vacuum is applied, have been used for some time in feeding individual sheets of paper into various types of equipment such as copying machines. For example, the Kodak Model Ektaprint 150 copying machine employs a vacuum roll to pull sheets from the bottom of a stack. The roll is provided with a plurality of squared apertures extending along that roll. The stack of paper is on top of the vacuum roller with the edge of the paper being supported out over that roller so that when vacuum is applied, the edge of the bottommost sheet overlying the vacuum roll would be drawn into the surface of that roll ahd subsequent partial rotation of the roller will usually initiate removal of the bottom sheet of paper from the stack.
Another example of a roller pick up assembly is shown in Southwell et al, U.S. Pat. No. 3,253,824, where the use of a rotatable pick up element is disclosed, specifically in FIGS. 12a-12c, with the surface of that roll being roughened or covered with sandpaper, sponge, foam rubber or plastic and designed primarily to pick up a single layer of textile fabric.